Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel s participation in eighteenth-century inquiries after happiness, an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton s innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His central argument is that...